Dark City Dvd

[Claribel Lizama]

Dark City is a 1998 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Alex Proyas, and starring Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O'Brien and Ian Richardson. The screenplay was written by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer. In the film, Sewell plays an amnesiac man who, finding himself suspected of murder, attempts to discover his true identity and clear his name while on the run from the police and a mysterious group known as the "Strangers".[4]

Primarily shot at Fox Studios Australia, the film was jointly produced by New Line Cinema and Proyas' production company Mystery Clock Cinema, and distributed by the former for theatrical release. It premiered in the United States on 27 February 1998 and received generally positive critiques, but it was a box-office bomb. Roger Ebert, in particular, supported the film, appreciating its art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects, and imagination, and even recorded an audio commentary for the film's home video release.

The film was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and six Saturn Awards. Some critics later noted Dark City's similarities to and influence on the Matrix film series, whose first installment came out a year later,[5][6][7] and the film is now widely considered a sci-fi cult classic.[8][9][10][11]

Concerned that audiences would not understand the film, New Line asked Proyas to add an explanatory voice-over to the introduction, and he complied. When a director's cut of the film was released in 2008, among the changes was the removal of the opening narration.

John Murdoch awakens in a hotel bathtub, with amnesia. He receives a phone call from Dr. Daniel Schreber, who urges him to flee the hotel to evade a group of men who are after him. In the room, Murdoch discovers the corpse of a ritualistically murdered woman along with a bloody knife. He flees the scene, just as a group of pale men in trenchcoats ("the Strangers") arrive.

Police Inspector Frank Bumstead is looking for Murdoch as a suspect while investigating murdered prostitutes, though Murdoch cannot remember killing anyone. Following clues, Murdoch learns his name and finds out he has a wife named Emma. When the Strangers catch up with him, he shows he has the ability to alter reality at will, which the Strangers can also do and refer to as "tuning" and he manages to escape.

Murdoch wanders the streets of the anachronistic city, where no-one seems to notice the perpetual night.[12] At midnight, he watches as everyone else falls asleep and the Strangers have the city physically rearrange itself and assisted by Schreber, change the inhabitants' identities and memories. He learns that he came from a coastal town called Shell Beach, which is familiar to everyone, though no-one knows how to get there and his attempts to visit fail. The Strangers inject a copy of the memories given to Murdoch into one of their men, Mr. Hand, hoping it will help them predict Murdoch's movements and track him down.

Inspector Bumstead catches Murdoch, though he acknowledges that Murdoch is most likely innocent, as he has misgivings about the nature of the city. They confront Schreber, who explains that the Strangers, which are extraterrestrials who use human corpses as their hosts, have a hive mind, and are experimenting with humans to analyze individuality in hopes of making a discovery that will help their race to survive. Schreber also reveals that Murdoch is an anomaly who inadvertently awoke when Schreber was in the middle of imprinting his latest identity as a murderer.

Murdoch and Bumstead take Schreber and attempt to reach Shell Beach but instead end up at a poster for the town on a wall at the edge of the city. Frustrated, Murdoch and Bumstead break through the wall, revealing outer space, just before some of the Strangers, including Mr. Hand, arrive with Emma as a hostage. In the ensuing fight, Bumstead and one of the Strangers fall through the hole and drift out into space, and the city is shown to be a deep space habitat surrounded by a force field.

The Strangers bring Murdoch to their home beneath the city and force Schreber to imprint Murdoch with their collective memory, believing Murdoch to be the culmination of their experiments. Schreber defies them and inserts false memories in Murdoch that artificially re-establish his childhood as years spent training and honing his tuning skills and learning about the Strangers and their machines. Murdoch awakens and able to fully realize his powers, frees himself and battles with the Strangers, defeating their leader Mr. Book in a psychokinetic fight high above the city.

Opening a door leading out of the city, Murdoch steps out to view the sunrise. On the pier in front of him is the woman he knew as Emma, who now has new memories and a new identity as Anna. Murdoch reintroduces himself and they walk to Shell Beach, beginning their relationship anew.

For Dark City, Proyas was influenced by film noir of the 1940s and the 1950s, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941).[13] The film has been described as Kafkaesque, and Proyas cited the TV series The Twilight Zone as an influence.[14] Proyas wanted the film, though nominally science fiction, to have an element of horror to unsettle the audience.[15]

Proyas conceived a story about a 1940s detective who is obsessed with facts and cannot solve a case where the facts do not make sense saying, "He slowly starts to go insane through the story. He can't put the facts together because they don't add up to anything rational".[16] In the process of creating the fictional world for the character of the detective, Proyas created other characters and shifted the focus of the film from the detective (Bumstead) to the person pursued by the detective (Murdoch). Proyas envisioned a robust narrative where the audience could examine the film from the perspective of several characters and focus on the plot.[13]

After writing the first draft of the screenplay by himself, Proyas worked with Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer to create the final script. Goyer had written The Crow: City of Angels (1996), the sequel to Proyas's 1994 film The Crow, and Proyas invited Goyer to co-write Dark City after reading Goyer's screenplay for Blade, which had yet to be released. The Writers Guild of America initially protested against the crediting of more than two screenwriters for a film but relented and credited all three writers.[17]

When Proyas finished his preceding film, The Crow, in 1994, he approached production designer Patrick Tatopoulos to draw concepts for the world in which Dark City takes place.[18] The city was built on a set, and no practical locations were used in the film.[16] Describing the city, Tatopoulos said,

The movie takes place everywhere, and it takes place nowhere. It's a city built of pieces of cities. A corner from one place, another from some place else. So, you don't really know where you are. A piece will look like a street in London, but a portion of the architecture looks like New York, but the bottom of the architecture looks again like a European city. You're there, but you don't know where you are. It's like every time you travel, you'll be lost.[19]

The production design included themes of darkness, spirals and clocks. There appears to be no sun in the city's world and spiral designs that shrink when approached were used. The Strangers' large clock does not have any numbers and Tatopoulos said "But in a magical moment it becomes something more than just a clock".[19] The production designer created the city architecture to have an organic presence alongside the structural elements.[20]

The Strangers are energy beings who reside in dead human bodies. At the beginning of the design process, the film makers considered having the Strangers be bugs but they decided the bug appearance was overused. Tatopoulos said one day Proyas "called me and said he wanted something like an energy that kept re-powering itself, re-creating itself, re-shaping itself, sitting inside a dry piece of human shape".[23]

About the character of Mr Hand, Proyas said: "I had Richard in mind physically when I wrote the character, because I had these strange, bald-looking men with an ethereal, androgynous quality", and O'Brien had famously played a similar character (Riff Raff) in The Rocky Horror Show. When Proyas visited London to cast the film, he met with O'Brien and found him suitable for the role.[15]

Daniel P. Schreber, the character portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland, was named after Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge with narcissistic, paranoid psychosis, and possibly schizophrenia, whose autobiographical Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Denkwrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken) (1903) inspired some elements of the film's plot.[24][25][26] Hurt was originally asked to play Dr Schreber.[15] Proyas said that Ben Kingsley was one of the original choices to portray Dr Schreber.[27] When Sutherland received the script he didn't understand why it was sent to him, thinking it was a mistake and that they wanted his father Donald.[28]

The film's soundtrack was released on 24 February 1998 by TVT Records.[29] It features music from the original score by Trevor Jones, and versions of the songs "Sway" and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" performed by singer Anita Kelsey. It also includes music by Hughes Hall from the trailer[30] a song by Echo & the Bunnymen that played over the final credits, as well as songs by Gary Numan and Course of Empire that did not appear in the film. The music for the film was edited by Simon Leadley and Jim Harrison.[31]

New Line Cinema wanted the filmmakers to consider retitling the film Dark World or Dark Empire to help differentiate it from the recently released Mad City, but Dark City was kept as the title.[13] The film was originally scheduled to be released in theaters on 17 October 1997,[17] then 9 January 1998,[13] and finally 27 February 1998, when it debuted in 1,754 theaters in the United States.[3]

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